Savage Pellucidar

What It's About

The seventh and final book in the Pellucidar series finds David Innes and Abner Perry back in the savage, sun-scorched world at the earth's core. While Innes and his mate Dian the Beautiful work to unite Pellucidar's scattered primitive kingdoms into a single empire, Perry turns his restless inventive genius toward aeronautics, with consequences that scatter the two friends across a land of hostile tribes, prehistoric beasts, and constant peril. Told as a sequence of linked adventures, the novel follows its characters through captures, escapes, and daring rescues as they struggle to find their way back to one another and to civilization.

Key Concepts

The book is built around the "Hollow Earth" concept Burroughs used throughout the series - a habitable world on the inner surface of the earth's crust, lit by a stationary central sun that makes time itself impossible to measure. Structurally, it's a fix-up of four linked novellas rather than a single continuous narrative, a format Burroughs also used for companion works set on Mars and Venus. Recurring themes include the imposition of "civilized" order on a primitive world, and the practical, often improvised nature of survival and leadership in a hostile environment.

About the Author

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) was an American novelist. Born in Chicago, he worked a string of unsuccessful jobs - including gold miner, cowboy, and railway policeman - before turning to pulp fiction in his mid-thirties, quickly becoming one of the most popular and prolific adventure writers of the twentieth century.